y, and all about catching squirrels
and planting corn; made poetry and hoe handles with equal celerity;
wound yarn and took out grease spots for old ladies, and made nosegays
and knickknacks for young ones; caught trout Saturday afternoons, and
discussed doctrines on Sundays, with equal adroitness and effect. In
short, Mr. James moved on through the place

"Victorious,
Happy and glorious,"

welcomed and privileged by every body in every place; and when he had
told his last ghost story, and fairly flourished himself out of doors at
the close of a long winter's evening, you might see the hard face of the
good man of the house still phosphorescent with his departing radiance,
and hear him exclaim, in a paroxysm of admiration, that "Jemeses talk
re'ely did beat all; that he was sartainly most a miraculous cre'tur!"

It was wonderfully contrary to the buoyant activity of Master James's
mind to keep a school. He had, moreover, so much of the boy and the
rogue in his composition, that he could not be strict with the
iniquities of the curly pates under his charge; and when he saw how
determinately every little heart was boiling over with mischief and
motion, he felt in his soul more disposed to join in and help them to a
frolic than to lay justice to the line, as was meet. This would have
made a sad case, had it not been that the activity of the master's mind
communicated itself to his charge, just as the reaction of one brisk
little spring will fill a manufactory with motion; so that there was
more of an impulse towards study in the golden, good-natured day of
James Benton than in the time of all that went before or came after him.

But when "school was out," James's spirits foamed over as naturally as a
tumbler of soda water, and he could jump over benches and burst out of
doors with as much rapture as the veriest little elf in his company.
Then you might have seen him stepping homeward with a most felicitous
expression of countenance, occasionally reaching his hand through the
fence for a bunch of currants, or over it after a flower, or bursting
into some back yard to help an old lady empty her wash tub, or stopping
to pay his _devoirs_ to Aunt This or Mistress That, for James well knew
the importance of the "powers that be," and always kept the sunny side
of the old ladies.

We shall not answer for James's general flirtations, which were sundry
and manifold; for he had just the kindly heart that fell in